Surviving Visual Novels
Fictoromantic
My primary school library had the incomplete Choose Your Own Adventure series, but the core first-generation books were there. I was determined to get the best endings in the one-week loan period, by cheating if necessary – finding the page with the best ending and reversing the choices to page one. Including the infamous “no path to page 101” best ending of Inside UFO 54-40 (1982). I mixed it up by making the best possible choices (apart from “Turn left” or “Turn right”) and exploring other endings.
In most cases, your character was a boy or a man, except in Mystery of the Maya (1981), a possible non-binary in Deadwood City (1980), and something else. Perhaps By Balloon to Sahara (1979) or Third Planet from Altair (1980). The series ran until 1998, so I believe there would have been more diverse main characters by the 1990s.
In my anime days, the visual novel games were never officially in the American market, as they were designed strictly for Japanese markets in the first place. I played around some pirated visual novels in the late 2000s and I’m sorry to say that I never enjoyed them. You’re always a boy without identity and the point of the game is to complete the sex routes with all available love interests (usually about five), while feeling the emotional anguish, as the stories can be that tragical. It’s said that Japanese, and East Asian men, need to cry in private as much as East Asian women who watch melodramas.
Pixelberry Studios released High School Story in 2013, and it became my favorite iOS game. In a build & manage game like FarmVille, you are the student and principal of a perfect high school. You buy and arrange the plots and new characters come along the way, many of them coming from Pixelberry’s earlier game Surviving High School. I named my main character Mary after Mary Richards, and I acted like her. Eventually, Mario is a wallflower and dates a fellow wallflower.
Pixelberry then moved to Hollywood U, with the same principle of building and managing a university for aspiring actors, writers, and designers. Now I became Mario from the start and dated the main girl, Addison Sinclair.
Finally, Pixelberry moved to their flagship product, Choices: Stories You Play in August 2016. At that time Episode had aced the market for two years, and Choices caught my attention for three reasons: The Pixelberry familiarity. The gorgeous lifelike art. Diverse genres beyond romance.
In hindsight, the early lineup is the best: The flagship The Freshman, with the typical love options of the white football captain (not Chris Evans), the Asian rock chick, and the preppy black graduate student (not Michael B. Jordan). And yet, by book three it is also shaken up by the mean sorority queen, who’s impossibly named Becca. After falling out with your default love interest, you have the option to have a one-night stand with Becca, and I never turned around. It’s the Rory x Paris moment realized.
Then the Lost inspired Endless Summer, which has comic book art instead of realist portraits. Eventually, fans wondered if this book was a fiction inside the connected Pixelverse. The Crown and the Flame is both a fiction inside the universe (The Freshman’s protagonist visits the set and becomes an extra) but also a reality, since the protagonist and the anti-hero are ancestors to European nobles in The Royal Romance. Let’s say that the cable series is a historical one, with dragons and wizards.
Like my own career and online social life, the game flourished in the late 2010s, and everyone jumped to the market, including the sketchy Russians and Chinese. To this day I’m still playing The Pickup Artist, which is less shady than it sounds and is closer to Choices than Japanese eroge visual novels. Each girl in PUA has her storyline that gets deeper beyond the dates and sex, and pretty much covers realistic problems in Ireland like debt, estranged family, office bullying, and body image. Despite the game trying to set itself in the United States, the characterization and plots are pretty…Commonwealth, they are like BBC/RTE dramas made for a lad.
Even NBC Universal, seeing the potential, launched Series with all its licenses, from John Hughes’ movies (not a universe since Molly Ringwald plays different characters in Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club) to Saved by The Bell and Vanderpump Rules. Furthermore, your main character was gender customizable in most stories and so were the love interests.
I used the past tense because NBC Universal folded the app just in months, as perhaps its income (from diamond purchases for premium clothes/hair, choices, and keys) was below projection, and you wouldn’t believe what they had to spend to produce a mobile game full of intellectual properties and image likeness to living celebrities.
You know what happened next. 2020. The founders of Pixelberry, including Oliver Miao, were subjected to struggle sessions where he said that he was crying as Choices had stories involving bad people of color, heteronormative romances, and no pronouns. Luckily those pre-2020 writings are retained to this day.
And so, everything changed after 2020. Uglier artwork. Worse writing, worse characterization (no redeemed racist like Becca), and more smuts including BDSM. Episode was also going there and removed its Pitch Perfect story for the convenient reason of license expiration. Anyway, the best story on Episode was/is user-created, a sex comedy titled One of the Girls, made by an Australian lesbian. Set in an American college, your main character is Jesse, who’s put in the women’s dormitory due to an administrative error. Jesse is stuck with a Canadian nicknamed “Mom”, a Floridan athlete, and an Alaskan goth (all appearances are customizable). It’s funny, raunchy, and unapologetic. It’s super wifejak.
But I couldn’t live on One of the Girls alone and uninstalled Episode and eventually Choices. I returned to them just as I returned to the newly changed X in 2023, and as everyone said on X, the vibe was changing. Covid was receding, and so was anti-whiteness. Pixelberry was sold by its Korean ex-owner Nexon to Series Entertainment, which seems to be an American AI startup.
It's cheaper to subscribe to VIP at Choices than buying the diamonds individually, and it was good until it lasted. Naturally many players like the older books better, and the game knows it as well, just like any streaming app knows that their vintage collection goes well together with newer productions.
Even Netflix gets into the game now with Netflix Stories, available for all Netflix subscribers. Like Series, Stories relies on property series and characters, led by Emily in Paris and Virgin River (it’s how I knew such series existed). You can customize everything about your main character and meet characters from the series, and while the love interests are not customizable, overall, they are good enough for me. Here Netflix doesn’t need diamonds but publication for its original series, as well as viewers’ preferences for storytelling. This is a customer survey in the form of interactive fiction.
And that’s how I survived visual novels. Knowing all the algorithms while enjoying fantasy. Grateful enough for the space given to straight men (obviously the story is written for women in default, so on Netflix Stories you’ll always have a catty antagonist in every story). And realizing that newer isn’t better and a rerun isn’t always bad.